Monthly Archives: July 2011

Nervous Norm and the Crossword Bandit

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The reported death of old-time Sydney crim ”Nervous” Norm Beves has provoked my nostalgia gland.  According to the SMH:

Nervous Norm’s criminal ineptitude was so legendary that for years ”Norm’s form” was used as the case study on recidivism for police officers studying to be detectives. …

Colourful Sydney racing identities, ex-crims, lawyers and golfing buddies were on hand to farewell Beves, who had once worked for George Freeman and later, when he wasn’t shoplifting, on the wharves.

”No one is unluckier than me,” Beves was heard moaning to his wife in an intercepted call played to the Wood royal commission on police corruption in 1996.

Actually, my great uncle Andy was quite a bit unluckier than Nervous Norm.  What’s more, he moved in a much lower class of criminal than old Norm. No-one in their right mind would ever have considered employing Andy as caddy master at the Australian Golf Club, not unless they were keen on daily trips to pawn shops to redeem the members’ clubs.  Andy even presided over the theft of all the grog from my parents’ wedding reception at Paddington Town Hall by engineering a brawl out the front to give him cover to back a truck up to the rear entrance while all the guests were milling around in Oxford Street.  The brawl hit the Daily Mirror at the time, but not the fact that Uncle Andy had ripped off the liquid supplies.

Andy had a nickname too.  The Crossword Bandit.  He used to fill them in to relieve the boredom of long hours spent “casing the joint”, but always left the completed crosswords behind at the scene of his crimes.  And when the CIB found them and came around to see him, he always confessed.  Uncle Andy was institutionalised.  He couldn’t cope on the outside.  One of the few clear memories I have of him was when I was about 8 and Andy accompanied us to Central Railway Station in Sydney where our grandfather was managing to hold down a regular job for one of the few times in his adult life.  He was selling papers on the ramp at Central.  “Sun or Mirror” he’d yell every few seconds as the commuters surged past.  It was the best he could manage as an epileptic with  a metal plate in his head after a fair slice of his brain had been shot away in France in World War I after enlisting at 16 by lying about his age.

As Andy accompanied the Parish tribe up the station ramp to see granddad, a couple of burly blokes in ill-fitting suits passed us.  “G’day Andy”, one of them said , smiling. ” G’day George, Fred” Uncle Andy replied in his thick Scottish-Australian brogue.  “Who were they?” my mum asked, impressed and nervous at the same time. “Oh, that was Detective Inspector Jones and Detective Sergeant Oldfield (or whatever) from the Armed Holdup Squad” , Uncle Andy explained.  It wasn’t the answer Mum had been wanting.

Gawker – The future of news?

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"Enormous Penis Located on Google Maps". Last time I checked, Gawker’s illustrated story about the huge penises drawn on school lawns in New Zealand had racked up over 46,000 views. A more recently posted story tells of how "A man in Russia broke into a hair salon and the owner of the salon beat him up, tied him to a radiator and kept him as a sex slave for three days" (it turns out the story is 2 years old and probably apocryphal).

In an article for the Atlantic, James Fallows visits Gawker and discovers a media outfit dedicated to giving readers what they want (rather than what journalists think they should have):

The first thing you see on entering Gawker’s loft-size open work area is a huge screen that looks like a nicer, higher-def version of what you might see in a brokerage house. The top part of the screen shows live views of the home pages of the main Gawker properties—Gizmodo, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Gawker itself, and others (excluding Gawker’s sex-oriented site, Fleshbot, which accounts for about 5 percent of the company’s total traffic). Together, according to [publisher Nick] Denton, the sites bring in some 32 million unique visitors worldwide a month, about the same as The New York Times and twice as many as The Washington Post. Meters display the second-by-second traffic to each site. As users log on to a site, and leave, the needles on the meters go up and down to register its popularity. The bottom part of the screen lists specific stories from each of the Gawker Media sites and across the company as a whole, ranked by how many people are viewing them at each moment—and those numbers are listed. As you watch, the stories switch places on the screen, each with a green arrow if it’s trending up or a red arrow if it’s heading down.

And it’s not just editors and writers who can view the stats. Gawker publishes them at the top of each story for everyone to see. There’s even a public page showing how much traffic each writer attracts to the site. When Gawker publisher Nick Denton announced a new bonus system based on "US monthly uniques" rather than page views Gawker published his memo to staff on the public website .

No doubt this kind of thing terrifies journalists. In an interview with Fallows, Denton explains that advertisers aren’t going to pay good money so that journalists can write about worthy topics. "Nobody wants to eat the boring vegetables" he said, "Nor does anyone want to pay [via advertising] to encourage people to eat their vegetables." At Gawker everything from the headline down is designed to attract clicks, tweets and links.

So if "worthy" journalism doesn’t fit into an online business model that depends on advertising, is there a way to pay for it? Denton suggests local volunteers or philanthropy. That should reassure nervous journos.

Thread of doom play for the day: Size does matter

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Disappointed Troppo readers everywhere have gradually come to a realisation – upon which I came clean on in a recent thread.  Troppo is really an ‘eyeballs’ play as we say in the trade and things haven’t been this good for eyeballs since Tim Blair sent some brownshirts our way a long while ago.  Anyway, it turns out that economic development has a surprisingly robust relationship with penis size. As this paper shows. Discuss with relation to any rocks you would like to get off. Baseless accusations are encouraged – though participants are reminded about our point of difference here at Club Pony – they’re not compusory.

Missing Link Friday – Costume edition

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Furry Fandom: Anthrocon is the world’s largest convention for people fascinated with humanlike animal characters. Held in Pittsburgh, the 2011 convention attracted more than 4,500 ‘furries’, some of them dressed as their favourite characters.

Canadian blogger and fantasy author Heidi Vlach went along to promote her new novel. "I think it’s unfortunate that the furry community so often gets a bad rap", she writes. "Many people are only aware of furries as a bunch of perverts in animal suits. But I’ve found it to be a community that accepts everyone as they are."

Conventional beauty : Ms. Blog’s Natalie Wilson visited Comic-Con and was troubled to see so many women ‘cosplayers‘ "with massive fake boobs and massively thin bodies posing for photos with leering men."

So he thinks he’s a power drill? When men are shown pictures of scantily clad women, the region of the brain associated with tool use lights up, says psychologist Susan Fiske. According to a 2009 report in the Guardian, Fiske "said the changes in brain activity suggest sexy images can shift the way men perceive women, turning them from people to interact with, to objects to act upon."

For Marcel that’s just one more reason why women shouldn’t post pictures of themselves in bathing suits on Facebook: "A note to young women on Facebook, from a guy who works with young men struggling with pornography…you might look good in your bathing suit, but if you were able to see yourself through 20 year-old male eyes, which are struggling to see you as a human and not an object, you would never post that pic."

At Feministe, Jill responds: "look, if dudes see women as not-quite-human, what you wear isn’t going to change that. And if it does change it, then dude has a problem. Why do you want to hang out with a guy who sees you as a ‘full human being’ only so long as you’re wearing a loose floor-length skirt and an oversize turtleneck?"

Terrorising terrorists: At Comic-Con Frank Miller unveiled his long delayed response to 9/11 the graphic novel Holy Terror. Featuring a Dirty Harry inspired superhero, Miller has described the project as "a piece of propaganda". Originally conceived as Batman’s struggle against Al-Qaeda terrorists, Miller eventually decided the caped crusader wasn’t up to the job: "This character is much more well adjusted in committing terrible acts of violence on very evil people" he said.

Ben Peek has a question: "Do all comic book authors become increasingly right wing and crazy as they get older?"

Moral hazard: costs money anyway you look at it

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AirBnb is a great startup which uses the power of the net to facilitate home sharing. When travelling, rather than stay in a hotel, you pay to stay in someone’s home – someone who’s somewhere else enjoying the scenery in someone else’s home. There are optimists and pessimists about how much difference it will make to the market it’s in – the market for temporary accommodation, but it’s a great service. Where lots of Web 2.0 sites facilitate the more productive use of cognitive surplus, this one does the same with accommodation surplus.

But of course there are privacy,  moral hazard and basic safety issues. AirBnb has always known it and so has built these features around its service:

  • Private messaging that lets users learn about each other prior to booking, without revealing private information
  • Reservation system that allows hosts to accept or decline guests, giving them complete control over who books their space
  • Transaction-based reviews that help users build trusted online reputations
  • Over 50 million Social Connections that show mutual friends through users’ Facebook social graph
  • Secure and reliable payment system that holds payment for 24 hours and facilitates security deposits
  • Algorithms that identify suspicious behavior
  • Flagging capabilities on every user profile, property listing, and message thread
  • Verified, professional photographs of Airbnb listings

That’s AirBnb’s CEO talking on Techcrunch. But now after 2 million home stays, someone’s stayed in someone’s home . . .  and trashed it.

The response is bureaucracy and cost.

  • Doubling the size of our customer support staff
  • Creating a dedicated Trust & Safety department
  • Creating a Host Education Center where hosts can find safety tips
  • Designing enhanced tools to verify user profiles
  • Facilitating richer communication between guests and hosts before booking, including experimentation with VOIP and video chat
  • Offering insurance options to hosts

Maybe in the end, convenience considered, AirBnb won’t be cheaper than its competition, the traditional temporary accommodation.

So I wasn’t surprised to see that, according to the CEO, AirBnb’s “vision”, to which it is “fully committed – this is as opposed to half heartedly committed, or even mostly committed) “that one day you will be able to travel to any city or town around the world, and with the click of a button, access local people and cultures safely and easily. We will work tirelessly alongside our community until that day is fully realized.”  A hotel might not be able to offer that as easily.

Rob Chalmers: RIP

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I knew Rob Chalmers who worked in the press gallery for over 60 years and has just died after what they call in the media “a battle with cancer”. Cancer won as it so often does.  Peter Martin does the honours here including reproducing a fine letter to Rob from PM Julia Gillard, which, on account of its ease, I reproduce from his site over the fold. It ‘s one of the finest uses of high office to send letters like that – read some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters to widows and mothers of soldiers who died on the battlefields of the civil war.

In any event, it led me to think, there was something different about Rob – though it wasn’t nearly as different when I knew him around 1983-4 when I worked for John Button and 1991-3 when I worked for John Dawkins than it is different to today.  Journalism was more of a craft in those days. There was still a strong distinction between news and commentary, and between the story and the teller of the story.

Journalists were not celebrities and weren’t as full of themselves to the same degree – Richard Carleton excepted. Certainly in 1983-4 and less so in the 1990s, the ABC was a utility, not a ‘brand’. Things were different in the media then – and mostly better.

Anyway, Rob was a nice guy, happy to talk with all comers – not one of those types whose eyes dart around the room looking for someone more important than you. May he rest in peace (though on thinking about it, I’m not too sure what that means.) Continue reading →

Skype spamming: Bleg

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Skype spamming seems to be on the up and up. I had about six people yesterday telling me they wanted me to add them to their contacts. I just got my second today. When I tell them I’m busy, they all seem fine with that, and don’t keep bugging me – or most don’t. But most want me to add them to my contacts. Why is that such a big deal for them – and am I taking a risk chatting with them for a minute or so?

What’s the economic model behind this? And yes, some are from Nigeria. (Though it surprises me they say so.)